How John Early and Kate Berlant Became the Secret Godfathers of Today’s Alt Comedy

The pair's new Peacock special is the capstone on an extraordinarily influential decade.
A collage of john early and kate berlant on a colorful background
Photograph: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

“Steven’s act? I heard he’s just doing John.”

This accusation was lobbed at me shortly after I started doing standup in 2013. The John in question was John Early, and the characterization was not entirely unfair. Early was a then-rising comic in New York, who had found a way to inject typical observational or biographical humor with a sort of self-concious menace, and a version of his halting cadence felt like an easy way for me to be gay on stage—to translate my nervousness into a persona.

Around the same time, at a sparsely attended show in Brooklyn, a female comic (she’s famous now) had just finished her set when I remarked to the host (also now famous) how funny she was. “Yeah, she’s a Kate,” he said. “A girl… but smart!” He, of course, meant Kate Berlant.

To this day, it remains an in-joke within the comedy scene that nearly every standup more alternative than Jim Gaffigan has cribbed their mannerisms and speech patterns from John Early and Kate Berlant. They are the godfathers of modern alt comedy, with an entire generation—from sitcom writers to TikTok stars—still cashing the checks they wrote a decade ago.

Once you see someone “doing” John and Kate, you will know. A cocked head. A widened eye. A feigned shock. Sharp, exaggerated movements clearly grounded in formal theater training, all delivered with a wink that lets you know they know they’re performing. There’s also the language: Berlant especially inhabits a liberal arts persona, wrapping her pettiness and self-obsession in the maddeningly obtuse vocabulary of academia, a trope so recognizable it’s easy to forget she pioneered it.

Their new special, Would It Kill You To Laugh?, now on Peacock, is Early and Berlant at their most potent: disciplined vaudevillians with a piercing lens on narcissism, desire and fear—a perspective that has rendered them not just wildly influential, but ideal foils for the selfie era. Thankfully, this often surreal hour of narrative and sketch has just enough weirdness to suggest their legions of imitators will always be playing catch-up.

Would It Kill You To Laugh presents Early and Berlant as 90’s-era sitcom comedians who suffered an infamous falling out, then revisit their relationship in a glossy TV special (hosted by a smartly patronizing Meredith Vieira). Early and Berlant are note-perfect with Hollywood satire: when Berlant enters the mothballed set of their thinly veiled Will & Grace parody “He’s Gay, She’s Half-Jewish,” the entire sequence is a dead ringer for the unbearably earnest Friends reunion of last year. Their eye for detail is unmatched: in her roomy white button-down and thick rimmed glasses, Berlant conjures an amalgam of Jennifer Aniston and Debra Messing—the off-duty actress self-consciously suggesting a commitment to craft. Early and Berlant wisely stray from mocking actors as simply “divas,” instead surfacing their neediness, a frantic search for approval in the eyes.

While show business is fertile fodder for the duo, they are even stronger as laymen, clearly fascinated by the tiny humiliations of quotidien life. Many sketches take place at restaurants, where the desire to be served stokes a hotbed of indignities. Near the end of a meal, Berlant’s character says, apropos of nothing, just to fill the painful silence, “it’s like Mediterranean food…technically?” It’s remarkably sad. Early leaves her hanging, staring at his phone, motionless, compounding her embarrassment.

In a surreal running gag, instead of paying via credit card, Early and Berlant’s various characters melt caramel cubes on a small hotplate, then nonsensically pour the burning caramel on a paper check. Kudos to the props department for nailing the aesthetic: a tiny hotplate with a big, infantilized power button, cast in the ubiquitous forest green of startup branding. The social commentary here—the insulting dance of American hospitality, disrupting industries that don’t need disrupting—is refreshingly non-didactic. Berlant and Early respect your intelligence enough to let you feel the cringe and revel in the absurdity without further explanation.

In another restaurant scene, Early, in heavy Gen-Z drag, argues the power outlet would be too far for his hotplate to reach, so he can’t pay: “I know my cord.” You can see Early luxuriate in this character—someone who can barely conceal her smugness when she realizes she’s escaped responsibility. “Like, I know my cord. It would not have reached there,” he repeats with increasing confidence. It’s selfishness disguised as altruism, immaturity disguised as self-knowledge. And it’s delightfully stupid.

Early and Berlant’s work is about the pathetic desperation of wanting to be seen. It remains uniquely relevant to our time, where being seen—by everyone, everywhere, constantly—is increasingly exhorted by the algorithm. It’s even more demeaning when you are gay or half-Jewish, and no matter how much of a glamorous, intellectual eyebrow you raise, you will always be someone’s gay best friend, or someone else’s token coastal neurotic.

Twitter has turned everyone into a comedian or pundit; Instagram has made us all photographers and brand partners. We are selling out. Early and Berlant have decided to be in on the joke. In their wake, many now attempt to let us know they, too, are playing the game, from overwritten Netflix cartoons festooned with self-referential asides to nubile standups with extended bits extolling their corporate pride sponsorships. Yet rarely is such performative narcissism performative enough to escape the narcissism beneath it. Rarely is it so observant. And rarely is it ever so funny.